Ethiopia-Eritrea: background to the conflict

Two years ago the two governments set up a secret committee to
decide what was to be done about the disputed areas. It was able to
achieve very little apart from noting the contentious points. On
paper, the Eritreans have a better case. In the declarations of 14
and 20 May 1998 they are only claiming the colonial border, in other
words the line drawn at the beginning of this century between the
kingdom of Italy and the Ethiopian empire. The frontier was defined
by a series of international agreements after the defeat of the
Italian troops in Aduwa in 1896, based on a tripartite treaty which
Britain, Italy and Ethiopia signed on 15 May 1902. This defines the
western and central part of the border where the recent incidents
occurred.

From west to east, starting at Khor Um Hagger on the Sudanese
border, the frontier line follows the river Tekezze (Setit) to the
point at which it meets the river Maieteb, then runs in a straight
line to the river Mereb in the north, at its confluence with the
Ambessa. After that it runs along the Mereb, crossing most of the
central plateau, then along its tributary, the Melessa, to the east
and finally along the river Muna.

There is no indication that the Ethiopian government is disputing
this line, which has remained unchanged since 1902. It appears on all
Ethiopian official and tourist maps, including those given to foreign
ambassadors by the foreign minister in Addis Ababa on 19 May this
year.

The Eritreans, however, are accusing the Tigrean local authorities
of using another map published in the Tigrean capital, Mekele, in
1997. In this map, small enclaves to the north of the Melessa-Muna
line (Tserona, Belissa, Alitenia) and a larger enclave to the west of
the straight line between Tekezze and Mareb, in Badme, are shown as
part of Ethiopia. It was here that the trouble flared early in
May.

In 1902 the Badme region was virtually uninhabited. At the time,
Badme was the name of a plain which the border ran across. Situated
below the Abyssinian plateau, it is an extension of the Eritrean
region of Gash-Setit, a semi-arid lowland area stretching westward as
far as Sudan.

In the last few decades, the area has gradually been settled by
farmers from the Eritrean and Tigrean high plateaux and the Kuneimas,
the earliest inhabitants, have villages there. When the United
Nations federated Eritrea with Ethiopia in 1952, the 1902 line became
irrelevant. Ras Mengesha, the Tigrean ruler, paid very little
attention to it, developing agricultural settlements administered by
the Tigrean district of Shire on both sides of the border. Since
then, the area has been periodically disputed. In 1976 and 1981, for
example, it was the scene of clashes between the Eritrean Liberation
Front (ELF) and the Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).

The two rebel groups united to fight against Colonel Mengistu’s
government and the problem was temporarily shelved after the Eritrean
People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) took control of the Eritrean
resistance. In 1987 the Mengistu government further complicated the
issue by changing administrative boundaries. At the end of the war,
in 1991, the Tigreans still regarded the area as theirs, although it
was patrolled by soldiers from both countries. The intergovernmental
committee was then faced with a situation that was very clear on
paper - the "colonial’ borders were officially accepted by both
states, as well as by the Organisation of African Unity and the
United Nations - but highly complex in practice, especially since all
the Kuneima tribes’ territory had been incorporated into Eritrea
under the 1902 treaty and the Kuneimas clearly took very little
notice of an imaginary straight line drawn across the plain.

In the central border region, the small enclaves already claimed
by the TPLF programme in the 1970s had been in the same ambiguous
position since 1991. But at least this western and central part of
the Eritrean-Ethiopian border is clearly defined on paper, which is
more than can be said of the line to the east, along the Red Sea,
separating the Eritrean Dankalia region from the Ethiopian Afar
region as far as Djibouti. According to the 1908 treaty in which this
border was established, it was supposed to follow the coastline at a
distance of 60 kilometres and a joint committee was to mark it out
later in the field. But when the UN opened the files forty years
later, they found no record of a demarcation.

The boundaries between the former Italian colony and Ethiopia are
fairly well known locally, but they are still disputed in a few
places, notably Bada Adi Murug, which the Ethiopians occupied last
year. The border runs right through a small fertile region
overlooking the Gulf of Thio in the distance, to Burie, on the road
to Assab.